You're the one who keeps changing the language. That you want to press others to give definitions but you won't even use consistent language yourself is telling.

You guessed wrong. But that's fine. You're clearly avoiding at this point because the flaws of your position have been laid out quite plainly.

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is the go-to book. "Cancer Ward" is also brilliant.

That seems wrong. I'd say that for a rule to be void it has to be ignored.

Your terminology is also off:
a) A law is always a rule, but a rule isn't always a law.
b) Enforcement is far broader than merely holding people accountable
c) Morals and law are two very different things. A law does not need to be moral, morals do not need to be laws. Morals that are broadly accepted are called norms.

We can use soccer as an example. A team has to respect its contracts with the players, this is a law. The players have abide by the referees judgments, this is a rule. He can punish players for breaking the rules, this is enforcement and holding them accountable. He can use various social methods (signals, speech, presence) to encourage following rules or norms, this is enforcement. It is usually seen as immoral to attack while the other team has an injured player down even if the ref hasn't stopped the game, this is a norm. You can play soccer without a ref, so the game is not contingent on an accountant / enforcer of rules.

We're not exactly sure what Carlo is, but an atheist he is not.

Your incessant jabs at "atheists" is immature. If it is the "Xs are delusional"-debate you want, Reddit is that way.

Other than that your insult also shows that you understand very little of these views. I can't speak for others, but I derive no conclusions from my atheism. It is a conclusion. I have a thing for this little thing called evidence. Which means I'm not overly impressed with arguments based on what the world should be. I'm interested in what it seems to be. If you want to make the case that there is a deity somewhere making absolute rules for humans, then show me how you know.

And on a more personal note, that you think a world without the powerful accountant waiting at the end is pointless and meaningless is on you, not me. Stop accusing me of your own potential existential angst. I like the idea of this vast, deadly and beautiful universe and being a part of it. That obviously isn't enough for you, but that isn't my fault.

Can a law/rule be safely ignored if there is no enforcement?

Laws are the legal versions of rules. They're effectively synonyms. The main difference is the consequences.

Enforcement is the method by which people are held accountable.

This depends on your definition of morality. With my definition they are synonymous. Your definition remains unclear.

No, it doesn't seem to me that you can. There may be no specific individual reffing the the game, but the players of the game act as such when one isn't present. I suspect if everyone were to ignore the rules, the game would not continue.

What's your evidence that morality is objectively true?

OrP has got me to change my premise, in case you didn't see the post. My argument is still valid for naturalism.

It doesn't matter whether you like it or not. The universe, based on your own damn requirement for evidence, is meaningless, purposeless, and beautiless by default. All of them words you throw around carelessly without consideration for what you are implying. If you claim it's not, the burden is on you to prove it.

I don't think truth exists outside logic, language and math. The = sign is a tool. Objectivity as an absolute is a dubious idea and seems impossible to find even if it exists.

I have never mentioned naturalism. I'm an empiricist, ontology isn't all that interesting to me. Maybe we study reality, maybe we don't. I don't really care. Epistemology is where it is at. If you desperately want to have a debate on naturalism, feel free to find someone who touts it.

I'm not the one talking about what the universe is, I'm talking about what it seems to be. I see no need to invent mysterious faceless entities to do that, and fail to see why rejecting such notions should in any way require a burden of proof. If you have evidence of the powerful accountant waiting at the end of the line, feel free to present it and we can have a debate.

Indeed, it is almost as if properties of the physical world and social interactions between individuals can make the need for rules and norms become evident.

I actually think bringing up "beauty" is good here. Humans find their universe beautiful. While some of the properties (like patterns, or variety, or breadth) are objective features of the universe, I don't really care whether those properties are necessarily, deity-bequeathed beautiful. We find them beautiful; we like to lie on our backs away from the city on a warm summer night and stare up at the stars and just wonder about it. That's enough for me, and the same is true for morality.

Good. A willingness to revise is a positive sign.

I'm not sure if/how Platonic moral realism could be coherent, but once you are there it doesn't seem like it would be that much of a jump to beauty being Platonically real in some sense.

Yep, it's a beautiful universe.

This doesn't follow. For instance, it is almost always a mistake in a no-limit cash game to shove all-in preflop with 72off as folding almost always has a higher EV. But you can still win if you shove. Does the fact that you can run ahead (or behind) your EV mean that strategic principles that emphasize EV don't apply or are pointless? Is it necessary for EV as a concept to make sense that after our death we settle up with the Poker Accountant in the Sky, who trues up our lifetime winnings so that they match our EV?

I'm also confused by how this argument fits in with your broader viewpoint. You have suggested that life has no meaning or value to naturalistic atheists because their worldview doesn't allow for objective morality. You have explicitly noted that people desiring or preferring something doesn't give it any value. But if that is true, then there doesn't seem any sense in which the world is unjust just because people aren't "punished" for breaking the moral law. After all, since there is no inherent value or meaning in a long life, happiness, wealth, health, good companionship, science, and so on, then there is no reason to think that specific outcomes for these things should be correlated with obedience to the moral law as good or bad things. Instead these are all, from a value sense, indifferent. So if an person breaks the moral law and also has a pleasurable life, so what? That pleasure is ultimately of no value, and his preferring it to pain makes no difference to its value. The only thing of actual value (again, on your view as I understand it) is the moral quality of his or her actions.

So it seems to me that you are being inconsistent here, both claiming that these things that people ordinarily think are part of a good life, eg wealth, health, pleasure, community, etc are of no actual value, but also that they have to be distributed so that good people necessarily get more of them. Your concept of "punishment" seems to rely on an assumption you've rejected, that some things in life are good and valuable things even in the absence of an objective morality.

Ok cool because this opens the door to an interesting discussion that relates to the real world. First off, I am sure as you know causality is difficult to establish. Just because humanity descends into moral degradation and rejects God that does not necessarily mean one event caused the other. Correlation does not imply causation.

There are several reasons that are causing humanity to go down an irreversible dark path. Rejection of God as an independent source of morality is not even a factor in my opinion.

Based on what you are saying, in areas with higher percentage of people that reject God we should see an increase in moral degradation.

What do you make of regions like Scandinavia that seem to be doing pretty well relatively speaking even though they are predominantly atheist?

Now we are getting to the meat and potatoes of it. Where does our sense of "guilt" and our sense of "conscience" come from?

What comprises these "inner constraints" if not our evolutionary biology?

Do you think you wouldn't have a conscience if you rejected God as an independent source of morality? Save for some serial killers and rare exceptions I think everyone has a conscience.

I agree and I find this really interesting. Often people leave Christianity and proclaim their emancipation only to replace it with another dogma. We certainly are hardwired for ideology. I think in general, even people who reject religion still find some ideology to help provide a context for their life. After all that was the beginning of religion, people needed to make sense of the world so they invented stories and myths to explain why things are the way they are. IMO religion is a necessary part of evolution even if the beliefs themselves are not literally true.

For example, Christianity teaches to "love thy neighbor". This is a functional message for communities to thrive. It doesn't matter if Jesus actually died and rose again.


I think most of the misunderstanding in this thread has been semantics. Atheists probably do reject the "moral realm". What we are left with in a world without God is social norms. Yes they can change over time. Yes they are subjective. And no I don't really have any good reason to impose my moral opinion on anyone else...except society works better when people don't rape. Like I said before in a world without God all we have in terms of morality is consensus and intuition. There is nothing deeper to refer to. There is no "moral realm". So in this case it might be fair to assert that morality doesn't exist. Not in the deeply religious sense you are referring to. It is just people on earth making their way and yes sometimes butchering each other and other times living peacefully.

Regardless of the label I put on myself I am still a functional atheist as much as I dislike that term. I would actually prefer if God were real. I think the idea of a grand reckoning and all the wrongs in the world being righted sounds great. I don't believe in God because I don't think he is real. I do wish He was real though. And maybe that is why I am not a very good atheist. It is hard to realize what one's own bias' are. Maybe one of the hardest things in life period.

The movie is better. Lol j/k I don't even think there is a movie. This is a great book tho.

That's more of a problem for believers in an omnipotent and benevolent god.

Ok.



Lawrence Krauss is an atheist naturalist, which is how this whole thing spawned.



The world seemed to be flat and at the center of the universe 1000 years ago. I think materialism and empiricism has provided a great deal of knowledge to the human race, but the deeper we go the stranger we find the nature of reality to be. The theory that consciousness and morality are emergent properties of physical systems follows in this vein, but there is zero evidence that they are. We have absolutely no idea what they are. The origin of life also remains an immense mystery. This is not a god of the gaps argument, it's just the further into reductivism we get, the more complex and harder to answer the really deep questions about existence seem to become.

No, you misunderstand. The word 'beautiful' seems to have no content if beauty doesn't exist. Similarly, calling oneself a good person is non-sequitur, if good doesn't exist. You have no burden to prove the rejection of claims, but you do have an obligation to be consistent in your use of language if you expect to be taken seriously.

Morality seems to be much stronger than that. It's ****ing wrong to rape and murder children. As in, wrong beyond the act. I think most people do assent to this, even atheists.

Not even close. I happen to care about that wretch. Or do I? If this is a cold, uncaring, clock-work universe that doesn't care about anything and in which I have no tool w/ which to reason/make decisions for myself why should I care about anything that that universe brings about?

Just out of curiosity whether you agree or disagree with the following statement combo:

"The best ice cream flavour is vanilla" is a subjective statement.

"BeaucoupFish thinks the best ice cream flavour is vanilla" is an objective statement.

Actually no, and I think this is a crucial part of the disagreement. When you declare morality to be "objective" you mean something about its existence rather than its meaning. This is why "wrong beyond the act" has meaning to you (what IS beyond, though?). The counter position is more likely to be held by an atheist, but is not necessarily atheistic.

Under OrP's secular morality, it can be objectively determined whether or not unnecessary harm was done. A punch to the face either happens or it does not. So if this is what we mean by morality (*) then morality is objective - any harm happens independent of people's thoughts and ideas.

Whereas you seem to view morality as something transcendental, whose existence itself is independent of people's thoughts and ideas.


I don't think I'm adding something new here, but this is kind of the crux of the difference, isn't it?





(*) To poorly paraphrase Dillahunty: if you're not talking about flourishing and wellbeing, whatever you are talking about, it's not morality.

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It's a statement of subjective preference.

This is just a statement of fact, if it corresponds to the truth.



No it's how I define objective morality. Moral oughts that exist independent of subjects they apply to.

No. That morality would be contingent upon humans. Humans go away = no more morality. I think moral oughts exist apart from

Exists on its own. That's the definition of objective.



That's a good example of his mediocre reasoning. He gets way more credit than he deserves mostly because he's a YouTube personality.

Presumably, you think that if humans did not exist, the moral claim "It is wrong for a human to rape another human" would still be true. But what is the status of truth if the set of objects to which it applies is empty?

Also rape is relatively common in the animal kingdom. Is it immoral there too?

Heh --- I was also considering going this way, as well as using the fact that many animals are not monogamous, which could also have unusual moral implications depending on the way the question is answered.

Do you think economic principles, eg the law of supply and demand, are objectively true? They are contingent upon humans in approximately the same sense as you mean above. But they are not dependent on human subjectivity. Neither I nor anyone else can just decide that the law of supply and demand no longer applies just because we don't like or desire it. It is an abstract description of how prices are determined in a competitive market. That description would still be true (or false) even if there were no actually existing competitive markets.